Folly Dance offers no respite. Percussive sounds clash at breakneck speed, as if competing to be heard. Vocals, drum machines, whistles, and cymbals hurl themselves around one another, seemingly approaching an imperceptible meter. It is the sonic equivalent of being inside the eye of a hurricane. Yet from the outside, the apparent chaos of the music has a clear and unified form. This unity is achieved through the skillful work of DJ Diaki, who conducts polyrhythms at 180 BPM and beyond, summoning ancestral West African balafon arrangements while putting his audience into a frenzy.
Despite being compared to the pulsing rhythms of Western electronic music, Balani Show is profoundly local and is endemic to the street-party culture of Mali. As a genre, it makes no compromises when introduced to other dancefloors. Listening to DJ Diaki’s compositions outside this local context is therefore an exercise in asking how we meet each other,sonically, without watering down our histories into a universalised Western framework. Such frameworks are rarely neutral. Often, they establish forms of hierarchy since they flatten diverse cultural traditions with homogenising labels like 'world music' and reductive curatorial rubrics like 'African art'. In such contexts, it is critical to consider how imperial countries and languages become the site and medium for grouping and narrating disparate histories or practices and who is excluded from this means of (self-)representation. As a unifying category, the term 'Global Majority' carries these tensions.
What DJ Diaki’s sets offer, however, is not a rejection of such groupings, but a reminder that the power of gathering under abstract global terms does not stem from the fantasy that we are all one. Such a fantasy, in fact, kills its power. DJ Diaki’s practice makes audible the distinct yet deeply interconnected conditions of capitalist globalisation that we all, in radically differentiated ways, are situated within. His rapid sound is a counterpoint to the insistence of sameness that can drain the collective power of such a gathering. It underscores how real power emerges from the process of colliding all the conditions that move us; in pushing forward distinct local cultures and their own forms of circulation; in experiencing ourselves as others together, not together as one.
Perhaps the power of a term like 'Global Majority' resides not in creating one hurricane that will swallow its own tail, but in learning to listen to and dance with a thousand hurricanes without demanding they become part of the same storm.
– Nadim Choufi